Years of everyday jealousy had begun to take their toll on the relationship between Victoria and Amalia. They squabbled about everything: money, the use of the car for lifts, and most of all for a fair share of their father’s affection (a commodity that was in limited supply at the best of times). Amalia kept telling their mutual friends that Victoria would not let her have her own sitting room at Knole. (‘What a liar Amalia is,’ Victoria retaliated in her diary.) They failed to acknowledge each other’s presence as they wandered about the great house, not lifting their eyes from their embroidery as one or the other entered the room.
A list survives, in Victoria’s handwriting, of her grievances against Amalia around this time. There were the lies that Amalia had told: that she was staying in Eastbourne with the Stanhopes when, in fact, she was at the Hotel Cecil plotting with Henry; that Victoria wanted her to go on the stage or be sent to a convent. There was Amalia’s ingratitude when offered suites other than Cranmer’s Room as her private rooms at Knole; her mischief-making over Flora’s baby; and her general gossiping to friends such as the Baillets and Mary Galloway. Many people, as a result, including family members, thought that Victoria had treated Amalia badly – Gilbert’s wife, Minnie De La Warr, for example, claimed that Amalia was ‘the most ill-treated girl in the world’.
Amalia wrote to Victoria from Buckhurst towards the end of 1896:
The last discussion we had on Monday night convinced me more than ever that we cannot possibly get on together. You may say it is my fault, you may say whatever you like, it does not alter the fact that we cannot get on, to try is useless. I have thought about it thoroughly during the last four days & I have come to the conclusion that it is best for you & for me in fact for everybody else that you & I should live apart as much as possible. Knole is my home, as long as Papa is there I must be there too, but I cannot continue leading the life I have led for the last 8 years in constant quarrels it is simply wearing me out, therefore to obtain peace I must see of you as little as possible as we always seem to fight directly we meet. To avoid any more rows in future I wish to have my own sitting room, it is only fair in my father’s house that I should have one, you all have one why should I not have one also? . . . I shall always try to fit in my visits so as to be away when you are at Knole & to be there when you are away, but there might be times when we should have to be there together & in the latter case I must have a sitting room of my own . . . Believe me, this is the only way of living in peace under the same roof.
On 2 December, Amalia wrote to her father with a slightly different proposal:
You know how utterly impossible it is for Victoria and I to get on together more so now than ever . . . I am 29 quite old enough to take care of myself & I must have peace my state of health at this present moment requires it. I could not stand any more rows my nerves are simply shattered to pieces. I know of some very nice rooms 3 guineas a week & 7/6 for food per day, if you consent may I engage them? Believe me Papa it is the only thing to do, just as much for your sake as for mine. If ever you wanted me, I should always be ready to come, but to live ‘en famille’ again is impossible.
Amalia’s position at Knole was made even more untenable by the way in which she had to sneak in and out of the house to scheme with Henry in London. Before she had received an answer to her most recent proposal from her father – who, as usual, was dithering and deferring to Victoria about what was to be done – Amalia had turned up at Knole in a fly (a horse-drawn carriage) at short notice, darted up to her room for a few minutes to collect some things for the Hotel Cecil, and then disappeared just as quickly. Her father wrote that he was ‘very much hurt at the surreptitious way you came to K. As you had such an important question to ask me, you should have seen me.’
Had Amalia asked her father openly about ‘the facts connected with her birth’, he would have explained all, he claimed, ‘but after the letters Henry had written and the telegram he sent me, I strongly objected to her associating herself with him in this matter in secret’.
‘It is so miserable to begin the year with this miserable business of Henry, Flora and Amalia,’ Victoria wrote in her diary in January 1897, starting the year in English for the first time. At Knole, there was a succession of weekend house parties – with the doings of Amalia and Henry the source of constant gossip and speculation. Mr Kenneth Campbell, a stockbroker friend of the Sackvilles, told Victoria how he had heard from Mrs H. Oppenheim that she and Lionel were going to be turned out of Knole. Mrs Knox the housekeeper was afraid that Henry and his associates would send someone down to Knole to blow the great house up – ‘after all’, Victoria added in her diary, ‘Henry threatened to burn it when I saw him in Paris.’
Neighbours, too, were enlisted in the campaign for hearts and minds. Victoria took particular pleasure in showing her upstairs boudoir to Mrs Arthur Cornwallis and Mrs Battiscombe, and telling them that Amalia had turned it down, as ‘it is not fair people should think I refused her a sitting-room’. Mrs Rogers of River Hill House was sympathetic, too, as were old Miss Herries of St Julians and Lady Amherst of Montreal Park; Miss Milligan at Ightham had, it appeared, been told less than half the story by Amalia; the Stanhopes, at Chevening, were amazed by ‘how abominably Amalia & Henry & Co had behaved’; and when Victoria heard that Amalia had written to Mabel Alexander, claiming ‘there were no differences between her and Papa & that he would be glad to have her back at Knole’, she scrawled in her diary ‘What lies’.
Early in the New Year, Amalia had left for Paris to stay with Flora, and from there she was encouraged to go to Cannes with Bonny, with Lord Sackville paying her travel first-class and 20 francs a day. This was never enough, complained Amalia, and she kept asking for more, pleading, to Victoria’s disbelief and disgust, that she had always been and still was ‘neutral’ in the matter of Henry’s claim. In a letter to her father from the Hôtel Britannique, Amalia explained how she would have to find work, given the uncertainty of her future prospects. She insisted that she was doing this not ‘out of spite, far from it; necessity alone forces me to’. Victoria, snowed in at Knole and watching Vita toboggan in the park, was scornful, adding double exclamation marks to the account in her diary of Amalia’s threat to earn her own living.
In February, Lionel and Victoria were told by their solicitor that they could safely leave for a few weeks’ holiday in Monte Carlo (while Lord Sackville and Vita were dispatched to Bangor). All the siblings, with the exception of Max, were now on the Riviera, in the country of their birth. Amalia and the Salansons, or so Victoria learned from Amalia’s maid, were ‘all desperately in debt and fully count upon Papa and I giving in & giving them money to keep their petition out of Court . . . They are determined to do anything.’ She also heard that ‘Amalia is tout à fait perdue’: a ‘fallen’ woman, given that her behaviour with men was so ‘perfectly awful’. Henry was being chased by his creditors, including his lawyers, Day & Russell, who were also pressing him to appear in the action for perpetuating testimony; if he refused to do so, they insisted, they would not proceed with the case and would not present his petition for legitimacy. It was not long before Henry had replaced them with another law firm, and was blaming Day & Russell for poor advice.
What particularly bothered Amalia was that she did not have enough to pay for her washing and, despite repeated requests, her father would not advance her the money on her next allowance. On 12 February 1897, she wrote from the Hôtel Britannique:
Though you have told me not to write to you unless I had something important to say I cannot help answering your letter. It has made me so miserable Papa. I am not going to write much about it, still I do want you not to go on believing whatever has been told you about me. It is all wrong I know . . . I have come to ask you to let me feel once more that you still do care for me & allow me to write to you now and then & show you that I am as ever.
Along with the withdrawal of his love, her father also demanded the return of some family jewels she had taken fr
om Knole. The receipt, which she insisted be made out to the ‘Honorable’ Amalia Sackville West, listed one gold chain with pearls and rare diamonds, one gold brooch with pearls, two rows of false pearls, one paste necklace, one garnet brooch, one gold bangle with turquoise heart pendant, and one gold ring with three rubies.
News of Amalia’s plight filtered back to England, through mutual friends and acquaintances whom she saw in Cannes: the Baillets, for example, and a Kent friend of Mr Pemberton who told him that Amalia is left ‘without a sou’. As Lord Sackville finally acknowledged in a letter to Amalia in March:
something definite should be settled as to your mode of life, the more so as rumours frequently reach me of your utterly unjustifiable complaints to outsiders of being kept without money. You have chosen to leave Knole, and ask me to provide you with the means to live on your own account. Let me impress upon you the importance of cutting your coat according to your cloth . . . It was your suggestion that you should go as a ‘paying guest’, and, provided you satisfy me as to the respectability and suitability of the family you propose to enter, I will give you an inclusive allowance of £360 a year . . . You will please understand that this allowance will only continue so long as you conduct yourself properly and live a life of which I approve, and that it must cover everything.
It was quite useless for her to claim that she had been ‘neutral’ with regard to Henry’s conduct. ‘Whatever your attitude may be now, I am perfectly well aware of the part you played in that affair.’
Béon, too, was in the South of France that winter. It was he who had encouraged Henry in his ambitions the previous year, placing himself, as he boasted to Lord Sackville, at Henry’s ‘entire disposal’, and providing him with the documents that lay at the heart of Henry’s case. In February 1897, he wrote once again, refuting what he saw as Sackville’s slanderous accusations of betrayal:
How can it be, Sackville, that you dare to speak of calumny after having taken an unfair advantage of my kindness in every way . . . If you do not act honourably in regard to me whom you called your best friend, be honourable at least towards your poor children who suffer on account of you . . . When your son Henry Sackville West came to me, I gave him a reception altogether natural and from the heart, for I had rescued, received and educated him. It is a noble action that you, their Father, should never have forgotten . . . What have I not done for you? I have sacrificed years of my existence and I have destroyed my future.
He recalled the day when Lord Sackville had thrown himself into his arms, and implored him in ‘the most touching terms’ to help him out, or he would be forced to abandon his ‘poor children and to send them to Spain for your family did not wish to have anything to do with them’. Why was it that Sackville had changed so much since then? For a start, he had not thought back then that one day he would become a lord. And, continued Béon: ‘Who is the person who has stirred up this quarrel with me? Who is the person who has made you quarrel with your children?’ There was only one person to blame: that ‘wicked and ungrateful’ Victoria.
She holds you in the hollow of her hand and makes you do whatever is good for her. You neither write nor say anything without her or by her mediation. Greed of gold devours her. It is inborn in her for when she was a child she would have done anything to obtain a few sous. It is this greed of gold that has made her change her opinions at the age of 30 years and which has given her this influence over you to incite you to repudiate your friends and your debts and it is this greed of gold which has incited her to separate you from your children.
Mardi Gras 1897 was celebrated a little diabolically at a fancy-dress dinner given by Gabriel Salanson in Cannes. All the key conspirators, including Béon, were present, and a strange ditty, scrawled in French on a scrap of paper, records the event. Gabriel came dressed as ‘a savage’, with a ring on his nose, feathers on his head, and a fig-leaf to cover ‘sa modestie’. Flora wanted to expose all her charms, she said, so her husband suggested she remove her corset and cloak herself in a transparent gown. Henry, ‘le Caffre’, came as ‘a Negro’ and made a speech over coffee, promising that when he became an English milord, he would invite all his guests over to spend the summer on his estate; he would throw ‘that’ Victoria and her gang out – and good riddance, ‘let the Devil take them’, echoed Béon.
On hearing that Béon had reappeared in their lives, Max warned Henry that he did not altogether trust him. Béon had threatened ‘to say all sorts of things about our mother’, he explained; ‘It remains now to find out what these things he intended saying could have been, and what it is he knew about her that he hides and does not tell you.’ The key to the mystery lay in the Villa Pepa in Arcachon, and one of the very few people who knew (how intimately no one was ever quite sure) the secrets of those shuttered years, who could unearth those buried memories, was Henri de Béon. Joseph Goring Lesnier, a childhood friend of Max from France, also pointed to the importance of Béon’s role, informing Lord Sackville that he had seen Henry and Amalia at Béon’s apartment in Paris in the spring of 1896 and that it had struck him they were going to blackmail him. Béon, he claimed was a ‘maître chanteur [blackmailer]’.
Another figure from the past who warned of a plot was the enormously wealthy Marquis de Löys Chandieu, with whom Victoria had fallen in love in 1889, to whom she had been ‘half-engaged’, and whom she had eventually spurned in favour of Lionel. In February, Victoria met her former suitor in Monte Carlo. And the letter she received from an anonymous well-wisher in spring 1897 is probably from him. Löys wanted to help her ‘dans cette nouvelle difficulté’ and warned her of a plot to blackmail the family. What puzzled Löys in all of this, though, was the role of the Salansons, who, it appeared, had nothing to gain. ‘You are absolutely right to fight this,’ he advised, ‘despite the scandal with which you’re threatened.’ Otherwise, what on earth would have been the point of ‘so much energy wasted, so many sacrifices made?’ It was a poignant reference to all the heart-searching of the early 1890s, when Victoria had agonised between Lionel and Löys, between being ‘a marchioness or a peeress’, but had eventually chosen Knole – and Lionel – over love for Löys. He explained how Victoria could write to him in Paris, before signing off resignedly. ‘Two daughters, chère Amie, that’s my lot, and I don’t want anything more, as I’ve no energy left.’
Amalia appeared happy at first with the proposed financial settlement of £360 a year but continued to discredit Victoria to Aunt Mary and her daughter, Mary Galloway. In a letter to Aunt Mary on 6 May, Lord Sackville tried to set the record straight: ‘There seems to be an altogether wrong impression abroad as to the position of affairs between Amalia and myself. The true facts of the case are as follows – Shortly after Henry’s first letter to me Amalia left Knole of her own free will, and wrote to me a few days afterwards informing me she could never return while Lionel and Victoria continued to live here . . . I consider that her behaviour towards me in reference to the part she played in Henry’s business has been little short of outrageous.’ It was ‘utterly false’ that Victoria had turned Amalia out of Knole; Amalia had left of her own accord – indeed, ‘Amalia’s conduct towards me seems to have been somewhat overlooked’.
Amalia was doing more than simply complaining about Victoria to mutual friends and relations; she was also actively stirring up trouble. Amalia told Maie [Mary] Cornwallis-West in Cannes that she had, in her possession, several compromising letters from Maie’s husband, William [Cornwallis], to Victoria. ‘The liar!!’ Victoria wrote in her diary, ‘I am not afraid of her threats.’ When Cornwallis confronted Amalia with her mischief-making, Amalia wrote to Maie from 10 South Eaton Place, where she was lodging with a lady friend: ‘I have just seen Cornwallis and a very painful meeting it was too . . . I write at once to retract every single thing I have told you.’ Cornwallis threatened to refer the whole affair to his solicitors, and on 2 July, Amalia drafted a formal statement: ‘I, hereby deny ever having stated that I possessed a compromising
letter or letters written by William Cornwallis West to my sister Victoria and I have no reason to suppose that any such letter or letters passed between them at any time.’ The matter was closed, although relations between the Cornwallis-Wests and the Sackville-Wests remained wary and cool.
On 13 April, the day that Victoria started work on a counterpane for Vita’s bed, the action for perpetuating testimony opened before Mr E. M. Hutton, Registrar and Master of the Supreme Court at Gibraltar, representing the Attorney General of England. Gibraltar had been chosen for its proximity to Spain, and statements were taken from a motley group of twenty-five Spanish witnesses – of Durans and Olivas, Ramirez’ and Rodriguez’, Gomez’ and Gonzales’ – members, friends and former theatrical colleagues of Pepita’s family. Pepita’s aunt, Micaela, could not sign her own name, and so her son-in-law had to be sent for; others simply left a mark. Alfred Harrison, who had been engaged by Meynell & Pemberton to obtain evidence in Spain, and to arrange for the Sackville witnesses to attend in Gibraltar, reported that lawyers acting for Henry had ‘visited all our witnesses at Granada and Albolote and told them not to be led astray by us, that they had a great deal of money for the purpose of remunerating all handsomely, that the matter at issue related to millions’.
The Disinherited Page 14